中世纪英国城市化水平研究

城市化发端和发展于前工业社会,工业社会只是大大加速了这一历史进程。城市化水平是国际公认和切实可行的前工业时期城市化的测量指标,但如何进行测定又决定于研究者对城市定义的看法。以往的研究者认为中世纪英国是一个低城市化水平的社会,而晚近的研究证明这种认识是不正确的。根据现在对城市化水平的衡量标准,中世纪英国不是城市化的“低水平状态”,很可能从13世纪晚期到14世纪早期起进入了城市化的“一般发展状态”,并在人口锐减的条件下基本保持下来,为工业革命后攀登“中等发展状态”这个城市化的第三个台阶奠定了非常重要的历史基础。     

New Light on the Medieval Gough Map of Britain

Remarkably little is known about the earliest surviving separate-sheet medieval map of Britain that takes its name from its former owner, Richard Gough (1735–1809), and that has been variously dated to between 1300 and 1400, and later. It presents a sophisticated cartographical image at a time when detailed maps of individual regions were almost unknown in Europe, yet nothing is agreed about its possible origins, context (ecclesiastical or secular), or why and how it was compiled. In the belief that historical interpretation has to stem from an intimate knowledge of the map as artefact—the state of the parchment, nature of the inks, palaeography—as well as image, an informal study group of historians and scientists (the Gough Map Panel) was convened in 2012 to examine the map through high resolution digital reproduction, hyperspectral analysis, three-dimensional analysis and Raman pigment analysis. Although the study is still ongoing, much that is new has been discovered, notably about the way features were marked on the map, Gough’s application to the map of a damaging reagent to render place-names readable, and the extent to which the original map (now dated to c.1400), although never completed, was nonetheless reworked on two different occasions in the fifteenth century, effectively creating two further maps. These and other findings are summarized here to encourage the further study of the map’s features that is needed before it can be fully understood.     

Burial in Early Medieval Scotland: New Questions

Abstract

THIS ARTICLE presents a summary and interpretation of burial practices in Scotland in ad 400–650. Due to the dearth of documentary sources, mortuary archaeology provides a window on the changes occurring at the juncture between prehistory and history. Yet previous work has generally approached burial as evidence for a single aspect of this transition: the conversion to Christianity. Rather than signalling ethnic or religious affiliation, it is argued that graves should be understood as acts of structured deposition which enabled new relationships to be forged between the living and the dead at a local level. The composition of the grave with stone, sand, timber and earth can be seen as a form of furnishing cognate with the use of grave goods elsewhere in Britain and the continent.     

Review article: Early Medieval Hungary in English

Books reviewed in this article:
Bak, J.M., Bónis, G., and Sweeney, J.R., (eds.) Decreta Regni Mediaevalis Hungariae
Veszprémy, L. and Schaer, F., (eds.) Simonis de Kéza, Gesta Hungarorum
Csernus, S. and Korompay, K., (eds) Les Hongrois et l'Europe: Conquête et Intégration
Kristó, Gyula, Hungarian History in the Ninth Century
Róna-Tas, András, The Hungarians and Early Medieval Europe. An Introduction to Early Medieval Hungarian History.     

Herlihy's thesis revisited: some notes on investment in children in Medieval Muslim societies

David Herlihy proposed "that we seek to evaluate, and on occasion even to measure, the psychological and economic investment which families and societies in the past were willing to make in their children" and suggested an alternative to both the "theory of discovered childhood [in Europe]," as introduced by Philippe Ariès and the notion of Lloyd DeMause that the historical evolution of child-parent relations in general formed a continuous and irreversible process of progress. This article shows that although we lack some of the archival sources that are essential for reconstructing the real lives of children in the premodern Mediterranean Muslim world, we are still able, with the "investment" criterion in mind, to assess attitudes toward children, at least in some defined periods of time and geographical regions.     

Archaeology and Myth in Early Medieval Europe: Making the Gods of Early Ireland

THIS ARTICLE CRITICALLY EXAMINES medieval¹1 Archaeology and Palaeoecology, School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK. p.gleeson@qub.ac.uk archaeology’s relationship with myth. A surge of research examining pre-Christian belief has seen mythology, place names and folklore increasingly utilised to reconstruct mentalities and cosmologies. As a wider global phenomenon, this trend comes with pitfalls that must be addressed more systematically. This article examines these issues through early medieval Ireland, beginning with an overview of recent trends in cognate disciplines, before proceeding through case studies of Tara, Brú na Bóinne (both Co Meath), and Nenagh (Co Tipperary). Far from being relics of prehistoric cult practices, many deities populating these landscapes may have been consciously invented for political, allegorical and exegetical reasons during the medieval period. This creative process had a marked 8th-century monumental dimension, contemporary with the floruit of saga literature. This precludes such evidence being utilised to reconstruct pre-Christian cosmologies. This has broad implications for research across European medieval archaeology that would seek to access ritual, belief and religion.     

中世纪英国宪政史研究的回顾——访问M．普里斯维奇教授

孟广林（以下简称孟）：普里斯维奇教授,您好!欧美史学界特别是英国的史学家对中古英国宪政史可以说隋有独钟,令人瞩目。您能简略地介绍一下英国史学界在这一领域中的研究动态吗？     

Early Medieval Settlement in Southern Russia: Changing Directions

Abstract

THIS ARTICLE CONCERNS the evolution of approaches to the archaeology of early medieval settlements in southern Russia. Over the last 70 years, a large amount of data have been collected, especially from sites related to the Saltovo-Mayatsk culture on the Middle Don river. In this region, large-scale excavations since the 1930s have produced information about the types of settlements and dwellings, making it possible to suggest what the overall settlement pattern may have looked like. By way of contrast, the early medieval settlement archaeology in the North Caucasus is less developed even though its beginnings go back further. Sufficient data exist only about a few areas of the region, in particular Dagestan, the Taman’ peninsula, and the Kislovodsk basin. In the latter area, a new systematic approach to surveys of, and trial excavations on, early medieval settlements have led to the reconstruction of the complex settlement hierarchy of the 5th to 8th centuries AD involving central fortifications, enclosed villages and a system of watch-towers.     

Technologies of Appearance: Hair Behaviour in Early Medieval Europe

Personal appearance in general—and the grooming of hair in particular—has long held a position of interest in historical, art-historical, and literary scholarship. The same cannot be said of archaeology, and the material aspects of personal grooming in the construction and communication of identity have not been fully synthesized. As a result, little attempt has been made to understand the social role of hair in less well documented societies, such as those of early medieval northern and western Europe. This paper considers archaeological, iconographic and documentary evidence for the significance of, and physical engagement with hair in early medieval northern and western Europe, and offers a model for the interpretation of grooming as a social phenomenon. It is argued that grooming was a socially meaningful practice, and that it played a key role in the construction of early medieval identities, as well as in the maintenance and manipulation of boundaries and distinctions between individuals and groups.     

中世纪前期的英国封建王权与基督教会

中世纪前期英国封建王权与基督教会的关系 ,处于“二元统一、对立”的状态中。从总体上看 ,英国封建王权和基督教会基于共同利益的政治联合 ,必然居于支配地位 ,而双方权益的纷争则处于从属地位 ,最后常常以相互妥协而告结束。这种看似矛盾而实则存在合理性的状态 ,稳定着英国封建社会的统治秩序 ,推动着社会的发展。     

Lest the Lowliest Be Forgotten: Locating the Impoverished in Early Medieval Ireland

In early medieval Ireland (ca. a.d. 400–850), every person's rank in society was codified in documents and visibly apparent by their material possessions. Early Irish literature is overwhelmingly concerned with the negotiation of status, but it is focused primarily on the rights and responsibilities of the nobility and wealthy farmers. Those of lower status are often ignored, and it has been difficult as archaeologists to agree on what constitutes a lower class site or artifactual assemblage. This paper addresses these arguments and challenges the belief that the lowest members of medieval Irish society are invisible to archaeology due to their impoverished existence.     

Water and the Urban Fabric: a study of towns and waterscapes in the Roman period in Britain

This paper highlights the ways in which components of waterscapes—rivers, lakes, pools, wetlands and waterfronts—formed elements of the urban fabric in the Roman period. Urban archaeology has focused mainly on features relating to land, while nautical archaeology, studying rivers, ports and harbours, trade and seafaring, reminds us of the importance of watery contexts. By examining waterscapes in the urban setting we can start to break down some of the traditional dichotomies in archaeology between land and water. Water could form an integral part of the lived environment and acquire cultural meanings that can be studied archaeologically. © 2012 The Author